After imaging completes, client starts imaging again or gives an Error -99

Products

• Deployment Solution
• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

Capturing or deploying an image to/from a Ghost Solution Suite (GSS) client may complete and appear to have failed according to the console, but the imaging process actually appears to have completed successfully. This may result in the client rebooting and starting the imaging task again, immediately starting the imaging task again, or failing the job with an "Error -99 during imaging process".

Cause

During the Ghost (or other) imaging process, the DAgent attempts to remain connected to the GSS Server so it can update the server upon completion of the imaging task. In some environments, such a connection will appear to be abandoned, and the network hardware will be configured to drop said connection. After this happens, when the DAgent attempts to update the GSS on the completion of the task, it will receive an error because of the dropped connection. DAgent will reconnect, and either the GSS will instruct the DAgent to run the imaging task again (resulting in either starting Ghost again, or rebooting to start Ghost again), or the DAgent updating the server with an error.

Resolution

The DAgent has a "keep alive" feature that periodically sends a small "ping" to the GSS server over its connection, causing the network hardware to recognize the connection as still alive. The default setting is every 15 minutes, but in some environments that's not frequent enough. In GSS 3.3 and newer versions, this has become configurable by adding the following to the end of the AClient.inp file in the WinPE boot option:

;---------------------------------------------------------------------
; PingTimeout - This value indicates the time interval (in minutes) of the ping request 
;				sent to the server by the agent. The agent 
;				will send a ping request every 15 minutes (default ping timeout). 
;				It is recommended to not keep a low ping timeout value as the server will 
;				be have process excessive ping requests which could lead to performance isues.
PingTimeout=15
;---------------------------------------------------------------------

Change the PintTimeout value to a lower number, rebuild the WinPE boot disk/option, and try again. Some attempts may be required to find a sweet-spot, as you don't want it to occasionally have problems if you're on the high-end of the sweet-spot, but it's also not recommended to set this value too low as it may cause excessive load on the server causing other undesired results.